SEMINARY HOSTS BOOKTALK SERIES

BookTalks is a collaborative effort of Barbour Library and the Center for Writing and Learning Support featuring in-person and webinar conversations with PTS faculty and community members as well as other guests whose work is theological in nature. Our host not only highlights the books' subject matter, but also discusses the authors' writing processes, welcoming audience questions throughout. BookTalks are enhanced by library staff-curated subject guides and library displays for those interested in finding related resources. Recorded and linked to the PTS website and social media channels, BookTalks are envisioned to be creative resources that engage all who participate in theological and spiritual reflection and knowledge.

 

Upcoming BookTalk Events

Jesus and His Promised Second Coming: Jewish Eschatology and Christian Origins with Tucker S. Ferda

Thurs., March 20, 2025
5:00-6:00 p.m. ET
Online Webinar via Zoom and In-Person at Barbour Library

In this pioneering study of Scripture and reception history, Tucker S. Ferda shows that the hope for Jesus’s second coming originated in his own message about the coming of the kingdom after a time of distress. 
 
Most historical Jesus scholars take for granted that Jesus’s second coming was invented by his zealous early followers. In Jesus and His Promised Second Coming, Dr. Ferda challenges this critical consensus. Using innovative methodology, Dr. Ferda works backward through reception history to Paul and the Gospels to argue that the hope for the second coming originated in Jesus’s own grappling with the prospect of death and his conviction that the kingdom was near; he expected a return that would coincide with the final judgment and the end of the age within the space of a generation. 
 
Bold and historically astute, Jesus and His Promised Second Coming (Eerdmanns, 2024) breathes new life into a long-stagnant conversation. It also offers readers fresh insight into the history of Jewish-Christian relations. Students and scholars of the New Testament will need to read and engage with Ferda’s provocative argument.

Dr. Tucker Samson Ferda is associate professor of New Testament. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, where he also served as teaching fellow. Dr. Ferda has expertise in a wide range of areas in biblical studies, including the Gospels, the life of Jesus, the Old Testament in the New, the history of biblical interpretation, Hellenistic Jewish literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the theological interpretation of Scripture.

Please register in advance. Attendees will receive the Zoom webinar link for the event.

For more information, visit our Libguide of curated resources for this event.

 

The Ethics of Immediacy: Dangerous Experience in Freud, Woolf, and Merleau-Ponty with Jeffrey McCurry

Thurs., May 1, 2025
5:00-6:00 p.m. ET
Online Webinar via Zoom and In-Person at Barbour Library

In The Ethics of Immediacy (Bloomsbury, 2023), Dr. Jeffrey McCurry examines how Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Woolf’s modernist criticism and fiction, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, psychology, literature, and philosophy in turns embraced the risks and dangers of putting immediate experience as the center of humanity, of respecting, understanding, appreciating, and following the lead of immediate, spontaneous, pre-reflective, pre-evaluative, concrete experience in human life. This book launches an ethical depth-charge to its reader: without any ideal, normative prescription, or even expectation, what responsibility, if any, does one have to interrogate immediate experience in one’s own life and times?

Dr. Jeffrey McCurry is director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center and affiliated faculty in the Department of Philosophy at Duquesne University. Educated at Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, and the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center, his research centers on the intersection of philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis, and he has published on Augustine, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Derrida. He is also a member of faculty in the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center.

Please register in advance. Attendees will receive the Zoom webinar link for the event.

For more information, visit our Libguide of curated resources for this event.

Past BookTalk Events